Will activists ever let go of the popular 'reduce the suffering' model of animal activism, and their corresponding campaigns to score 'humane farming' victories? Isn’t it finally time we stopped tinkering with dominion and reclaimed the term animal liberation for the vegan platform?
LEE HALL: Will activists ever let go of the popular “reduce the suffering” model of animal activism, and their corresponding campaigns to score “humane farming” victories? Some states and nations are banning crates for veal calves and for laying hens. Does this make veal or eggs better? No! There is no good animal agribusiness…
For decades, Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University and the author of Animal Liberation, has convinced activists to pursue husbandry adjustments for commercial hens and other commercially owned animals. The model keeps activists both busy and frustrated with the politically impossible work of making the treatment, transportation and slaughter of “livestock” bearable, while agribusiness expands and becomes more intensive as demand expands.
In 2006, Singer told an interviewer at The Vegan Society that “we need to cut down drastically on the animal products we consume.”… In a 2006 interview for Salon.com, when Oliver Broudy asked for an opinion on bio-engineering chickens without brains, Singer answered: ‘It would be an ethical improvement on the present system, because it would eliminate the suffering that these birds are feeling. That’s the huge plus to me’.
To believe zombie chickens are “an ethical improvement” is to promote a deep disrespect for the living beings who evolved here on Earth… Singer’s concern has always been about managing suffering and not the profound unfairness of systematic oppression…
We need to use our precious time defending animals’ interests in living untamed, on their terms. A leading reason for the planet’s lack of untamed space is the sheer vastness of our animal farming operations. And yet Singer also accepts animal breeding, including for farming. Singer, with Jim Mason in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter wrote: ‘If the lives of the sheep are, on the whole, good ones, and they would not exist at all if the lambs were not killed and eaten, it can be argued that doing so has benefits, on the whole, for both human and animals’…
Former animal farmer Harold Brown has said: ‘When someone portrays animal farming on any scale as a harmonious balance of natural forces, they are either delusional or lying’… Animals aren’t benefited when we purpose-breed them. In doing so, we take away from their communities all that made them free… Isn’t it finally time we stopped tinkering with dominion and reclaimed the term animal liberation for the vegan platform? SOURCE…
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